Organizing this symposium was a tremendous learning process for all of us. Here, we record the process we used, and the guidelines we’d follow (or not!) if we were to do it all over again. We hope they’re helpful to junior scientists looking to organize meetings of any kind, but especially those dealing with systemic issues affecting the research enterprise.   The organizing tips are presented below in topical “chunks” arranged in the chronological order we found they first required attention. However, most chunks have tasks that need to be executed over a long time scale. To facilitate the management of this, we assigned individual people to coordinate many of them.   If you’d like to organize your own symposium on these topics, please feel free to use whatever assets we have that may be useful to you. We would be delighted to offer additional advice; please feel free to contact us at [email protected]. We’d love to help spread the word about your meeting!